Viva Swan

A Passage from Luminous Airplanes, or Things As They Were:
A Hyperromance

When I returned to San Francisco in the summer of 2003, one of the first things I did was to search, or re-search, the filing cabinet, which the stranger who was then living in my apartment had had the kindness not to throw away. I found the thick folder labeled SWAN in about two minutes, one drawer below where I thought I’d put it. And when I left San Francisco the following spring, to try my luck at love in Canada, the next-to-next-to last stop on my disastrous ping-pong travels across North America, the leaflets came with me. I have them still.

The text is hard to read at this size, but you might notice that Swan’s lettering is not unlike the type I’ve used for the interface of this site, to the annoyance of my graphic-designer friends. That’s on purpose. This Commentary in all its mad branches is among other things an homage to Swan, who, unlike these leaflets, I was in the end unable to find.